coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
coffee_enjoyer
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3hr ago
Connotation plays a big role here. “Stuck in a forest with a man” is a phrase that has horror movie connotations, and isn’t going to be analyzed in some dispassionate objective meticulous way (the median forest of median size, with the median man, some random distance away). That’s just not how humans will interpret questions on the fly. The question begs to be understood in terms of conflict: why else would you be stuck? Why else would man be compared to bear? The question would be a lot different if it was: “[points to a random man] would you rather be 200ft from that man in a forest, or 200ft from a bear?” Women also do not want to signal that they are interested in strange men, but they do want to signal that they like animals, which is feminine-coded in America.
coffee_enjoyer
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13hr ago
Football has for decades been a way to stave off unrest. First, the sport attracts the attention of violent men without impressive economic prospects, as the sport itself is visibly violent and masculine. It is the closest similitude to war (armor, helmets, commands, clashes). It gives these men a castrated, impotent tribal identity in the form of regional teams, which are corporations motivated by capital without any serious tie to a region or interest. The men wear the insignia and colors of their favorite team and recite the assigned warcries. This establishes the attention of the cohort who are at most risk of unrest. Now that they have your attention, they push domestication propaganda in the form of rituals (national anthems, even the new “black” national anthem) and spectacles (ads, half time shows). After a Super Bowl there are occasional riots, but this is like when the waters of a flooded dam are redirected so as to keep the integrity of the dam — the Super Bowl brought tens of thousands of the most passionate fans, and not all of them will have their masculine energy siphoned off completely; they are allowed to expend the rest of their energy in a controlled way.
You might think, “but what about the kneeling for the flag controversy? Didn’t this create more controversy rather then unity?” No, this acted as a marketing campaign to give football more attention in the at-risk cohorts (black nationalists and MAGA guys). Both of them are now tuning in to football news, maybe they watch and want the kneeler to lose, maybe the opposite. Were they to ignore that controversy, they would not be capturing the full cohort they want and neither would they be accomplishing the sublimation ritual. Adding gambling to football culture was another way to do this (while producing an enormous profit), because gambling was already in video games but you want attention given to football as well. I think this is also why the “Sketch” streamer is being astroturfed. This is where Travis and cowboys and TSwift come in. They code right, they bring in more viewers.
What is the cognitive difference between someone who uses a living experienced figure of speech, versus a dead metaphor only understood through conversation? Examples: run a tight ship, get on board.
When sailing was commonplace in English culture, these phrases would convey salient and significant experiences: the idea of strict rank inherent to seafaring, the idea of one singular authority deciding life and death with no one else around for hundreds of miles, civilized cooperative order versus chaos (ship versus rough seas), the prospect of status enhancement from obedient conduct; and the “board” of the ship meant near-claustrophobic proximity, rank-and-file, before tasks were dispersed. None of this meaning is transmitted in the expression today, only the connotation of when the phrase was previously heard by you. So, if you heard “run a tight ship” today, you would probably just imagine a manager who likes to be hands-on… and that’s it.
Some questions:
Am I just wrong here? I don’t think so. Consider the new zoomer expression “delete your account”. This expression conveys meaning which would be lost on someone living in 1860. It implies an immediate, swift, final action which totally eliminates a type of socializing (a type alien to the 19th century). We can easily imagine “delete your account” becoming an offline expression in the future, but then it would only connote basic shaming.
Are metaphors, in some sense, vastly more important for cognition than we think? How do we understand a word without metaphor? A word like “sufficient” seems to connote less than a phrase, just a small intellectual feeling without image, emotion, sound, texture — a hunch.
Should we kill off dead metaphors, and somehow replace them with living metaphors?
Should we give children a breadth of metaphorical experiences in the Montessori sense for cognitive gain?
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